Views on the Auto Mute. Remove it?

Games Other Halo
1

The auto mute brought something new to Halo; Aggravation for the most part. It’s a system that in my eyes is abused. In Halo 3 and Reach it was made simple to mute people. Hold back and press X in Game, even easier in a pre-game lobby. Did bungie forget that gamers can think for themselves?

In my opinion remove this mute system it screams abuse. I have found that it works on how many people mute a certain player, in theory this would work because if you get muted lots you must be annoying right? This is just not the case unfortunately players have habits of muting everyone because they are too lazy to change there audio settings, or people will just mute others because of accents. There are hundreds of reasons people mute others that isn’t the problem though.

Why should the receiving end be punished? It is highly frustrating being muted for no reason in Reach because communication is key. I have been victim to the mute ban 3 times. To be honest i don’t even know why.

  1. I don’t speak much or talk trash, usually i’m having a conversation with my team whilst a match starts.
  2. There was a time where i had 2 weeks off Reach, came back and was muted again.

It all just seems random, plus the duration seems too long. It’s a mechanic that should just be removed. Thoughts?

Tl;dr Remove Auto Mute, because players can think for themselves and mute when necessary it’s not hard. Plus it’s an abused system that is highly annoying for innocent victims.

2

Agree with this fully, I am not a guy that is the competitive type anymore but I know in the MLG Playlist, guys mute each other to stop call outs from being heard and then people are mostly mute banned from this.

It was a good idea but wasn’t implemented correctly.

3

Agreed. The first time I realised I had been mute banned I made a thread about it on Bungie.net, just to try and get some information about it really.

I wasn’t expecting so many people to admit that they, along with their friends, will mute anyone at the beginning of a game, just because they don’t want to hear them talking, or because they don’t want to be heard giving call-outs and such.

It’s not good enough for Bungie to say ‘you can mute everyone via your audio settings’. Most people will simply do what they have always done when playing Halo - mute 'em the old fashioned way = eventual mute ban.

Almost every game I go into I find muted people, and it’s actually starting to annoy me now. I shouldn’t have to constantly un-mute my teammates.

It’s most frustrating in BTB. If I get sniped and I know where the sniper is, I want to be able to let my team know. Not gonna happen if I’m auto-muted and my team don’t un-mute me because they assume I’m muted for a good reason.

I will always un-mute everyone I see who has been auto-muted. And ya know what? From my recollection only two of those people were playing music through their headset. A few more were kids who obviously had Kinect or something and there was a lot of irritating, high pitched voices coming through, with background noise to boot. Yeah, I can understand how they got muted. No one wants to put up with that through-out the whole game.

But in most cases, it’s people just like me. They’ll chat when you talk to them, give call-outs and such, but generally just keep quiet.

So… at what point did someone at Bungie say “Let’s make it so that when a player gets a certain amount of mutes, they get permanently muted for a whole month!” and think it was a good idea?

And at what point was anyone going to say “Uh, well, that seems like a mechanic that would get horribly abused…”

But most importantly, when and why did Bungie suddenly decide that we’re all brain-dead morons without thumbs who can’t press a few buttons!

/End rant.

4

The auto mute, or mute ban as it’s called by some, it the most idiotic thing ever. And I’ve said so since I first heard of it way before Reach was released.

You should never give players the power to take away someone else’s ability to communicate even if he needs to be muted by a thousand people before the mute ban triggers. You can bet your precious backside that such a system will be abused simply because it can be abused.

There are more than enough idiots who mass-mute other players because they get a kick out of the idea that they will have been at least partially responsible for causing someone to suffer from an undeserved mute ban. Sad but true.

Rule #1: You NEVER give people the power to harm other players’ online experience because of rule #2.
Rule #2: People are yoinking stupid!

5

Useless, abused, redundant, and the majority of the population who knows about it despises it…

…

Keep it in.

6

I just dont think people should be mute banned if they get muted to much thats my only gripe with it. The only time I mute people is when they are trash talking, yelling, and just saying every racial and homophobic slur they can think of of.

7

i dont mind it, its kinda like a warning system bc i always unmute the people to observe why they were muted in the first place…

in each case it was blatantly obvious why they were muted, for vulgar language/ constant mic static/ constant screaming, so the system does work good and should remain in place from what ive witnessed.

8

I think you are one of the minority here. In my experience when i unmute someone they don’t have a mic in. What you say apollo i have only found once.

Unfortunately the system gets abused and people get victims of the auto mute for no reason. I say get rid of it. If you want to mute someone it’s quite easy to do it.

Halo players can think for themselves.

9

Recently found out that I have been auto muted and don’t know why. I am new to halo and have only been playing reach for about a month. Not only do I not know the " callouts " correctly, I am a nice quiet player and have ended up not being able to communicate because other people mute everyone. Needless to say, I’m frustrated.

10

Auto-mute is stupid and flawed. It’s so easily exploited.

11

I think there are some who it definitely works for (I go to unmute them, then all I hear is singing, screaming, or general annoyingness), but there are others who I really don’t see why they were auto-muted.

So yeah, I think they could remove the system. Not because it’s easily “exploited” or whatever, but because it really doesn’t make much sense to me. If people don’t like what they’re hearing from a person, it’s not that difficult to mute them! We don’t really need a system to do it automatically.

12

I’m somewhat certain it has something to do with your social preferences in your Psych Profile. Whatever options you choose not only affect who you’ll be matched with, but also help keep the game tailored to you by automatically muting people with opposite standards. For example; someone with a Tone setting of “Rowdy” might be automatically muted for someone with a setting of “Polite”. I can’t confirm this, but I can say it seems to be a rather possible thing.

13

I agree with disabling the mute ban system.

14

At least you know quickly who plays a lot of MLG lol.